


Air Nomad Coffee

by ItsaVikingThing



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Bad Puns, Coffeeshop AU, F/F, Ikki narrating, Just blending, No Bending, cute stuff, of sorts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 11:24:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11531217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItsaVikingThing/pseuds/ItsaVikingThing
Summary: If Republic City was famous for nothing else, it would be famous for its coffee shops.There are a lot of different places that serve coffee in every conceivable way, but where the craze for coffee shops started is Aang's Air Nomad Coffee. And thanks to its talented staff, including the greatest coffee blender of them all, Korra, Aang's is still the best coffee shop in the city.Aang's has a lot of history, and if there's one person who knows it all, it's Aang's granddaughter, Ikki.Come on in, and let Ikki tell you a story.But be warned: it's a story that involves love, and coffee, and bad guys, and fixing things, and a girl called Korra, and another girl called Asami, and what really went down at the last ever Pro-Blending Tournament. And most importantly of all, cute stuff!





	Air Nomad Coffee

Do you want to know what my favourite sound in the whole of Republic City is? It's the ringing of a bell. Not just any bell, though; _that_ bell, the one above the door to Aang's Air Nomad Coffee.

There are _so many reasons_ why I love that sound!

One is, when I'm outside that means I'm about to go in and it's like I'm going home, but even better! Home isn't full of strange people, except Meelo, and it isn't _exciting_.

My name's Ikki. You've probably heard of my dad, Tenzin. He's the coffee master of the whole Air Nomad Coffee Company. So I sort of grew up around coffee, and coffee shops, even though I'm not allowed to drink any, even though I totally do.

I just had some! Bolin over there gave it to me, because he's what's called a 'soft touch', _especially_ if you say something nice about his girlfriend, Opal.

(Which is so easy it feels like cheating, because Opal's one of the nicest people around and she's really pretty, and I like her.)

I love my dad, but sometimes I think if I wasn't allowed in the coffee shop I'd never get to see him. Even then, he has to travel a _lot_. It makes me miss him, but he always comes home with wonderful things from all over the world.

A lot of the time, it's different coffee beans and other stuff for his job. But he brings back toys, and clothes, and stories, and all kinds of things!

But the best thing he ever brought back to Republic City wasn't a thing at all. She's a girl called Korra.

I have a big sister, Jinora, and a littler brother, Meelo, and a _tiny_ brother, Rohan. I have to love them even when they're being dumb. It's not _too_ hard, because they aren't dumb all the time, except Meelo, but I love Korra and it's always easy even though she isn't really my big sister.

I mean, Korra does dumb things a lot, and sometimes she makes dad mad, and she doesn't give me coffee, but she _does_ give me cakes, and she's also sweet, though she pretends she's tough, and she's funny and she plays with me when she's not busy and sometimes when she is. But mostly she's always so interesting!

This is my second favourite thing about Korra: things always happen around her. Like on her very first day in Republic City, she caused a Satomobile accident when she stopped a bunch of thieves who were robbing an old man. My aunt Lin, who isn't my real aunt, because my real aunt is called Kya, but anyway, aunt Lin arrested Korra and she was late for work and my dad had to bail her out and that was just her _first morning_ in Republic City.

Korra's been with us for three years now, and so much has happened! Let me put it this way: I know a _lot_ of good stories, but all the _best_ stories I know have Korra in them.

Oh, and this isn't really a story, but you should know, one time I was playing in the shop when I was little. Korra was working and I started running around and I bumped into a man waiting to get served and he yelled at me and I started to cry.

Now, Korra pretends to be tough, but she isn't, only I wouldn't ever make her real mad at you. This man making me cry made her _so_ mad. You know what she did? Korra just vaulted over the counter and picked the man up and threw him outside.

Like, actually threw him. He went from inside the shop to the pavement outside before he touched the ground.

Korra is _really_ strong.

But then she picked _me_ up and she hugged me and sort of quietly talked to me until I felt better.

You see, Korra's really kind, too. And that's my favourite thing about her.

That's what I told Asami, because I was worried when they didn't seem to get along right away. But Asami's really smart, and I think she would've figured Korra out eventually, even if I hadn't helped her.

But I did help her. And Korra. I don't think things would've worked out so well if I hadn't, you know?

Oops! I...got ahead of myself. I do that sometimes. Sorry!

But I guess it's a good time to tell you the second reason I love the sound of that bell! When I'm inside the store, it means someone's coming in. Maybe it's a regular, which means it's a friend.

Or maybe it's my mom, or my dad, and I'm going to get a hug.

Or maybe it's Bolin, and I'll get to play with his fire ferret, Pabu, and laugh at all the silly things he does. Bolin, I mean, not Pabu. Pabu is very dignified.

Or maybe it's Opal, or Mako, or my not aunt Lin, or my real aunt Kya, or my uncle Bumi, or...there's so many people in our family now, because of the shop, and the bell keeps making my family bigger and better all the time!

And a lot of the time it's someone entirely new, like you! Someone with an interesting face or a story to tell. And, sure, sometimes it's a mean person, or a rude person, but the point is you never really know and that's why it's so exciting.

Every time the bell rings, it could be the start of a whole new story! A whole new _adventure_!

There are a lot of stories I could tell you, but my favourite is the one about Korra, and Asami Sato, and the Pro-Blending Tournament, so that's what I'm going to tell you now, okay?

* * *

If you're going to understand this, I need to tell you some things about Korra and some things about coffee and some of those things are the same things, but I'll try to only tell you once.

I guess I'll start with coffee which is a big deal all over the world but a _huger_ deal in Republic City.

My dad says that without coffee, Republic City would grind to a halt, and I _think_ that's a metaphor, which is a bit like a lie, only not in a bad way and it's also _almost_ true.

Coffee is really complicated and only coffee masters (like my dad) and their specially trained children (like me) can really, really understand all about it.

But I'll tell you what you need to know as quick as I can so we can get to the bad guys and the things that really matter, which are the cute things. Cute things are _so vital_.

So what you need to know is that coffee is made from beans. Each different nation grows their own beans, and they all taste different. The Earth Kingdom grows most of the bean varieties, and it all gets technical, but there's around forty different beans in the Earth Kingdom alone! And people are trying new ways to grow different tasting coffee _all the time_.

The Fire Nation produces a lot less coffee beans, but their varieties have a lot of light delicate flavours and are highly prized by snooty people like my mom says my dad is. He always huffs when she says that, but I can tell he's not really annoyed at all.

Even though they're _really_ old, my parents are still kind of cute, sometimes.

You might think the Water Tribes at the North and South Poles don't produce coffee, because of where they live, and you'd be totally wrong and look really silly in front of your friends so...you're welcome!

Polar coffees are the rarest of all, but they're supposed to be the best in the whole entire world. They're so good, they can't be used to make coffee for little girls, _apparently_ , even if those girls are nearly eleven and not little _at all_.

We Air Nomads don't grow our own beans, because we move around a lot. (Although not really anymore since Aang moved our family to Republic City.) But we might just be the most important people in the story of coffee because we travel all around and we _love_ coffee. 

Because we moved around and bought beans wherever we went, we're the people who started blending different beans from different nations and finding lots of new flavours that way. And pretty soon we were trying different roasts, and then different ways of grinding the beans, and brewing them, and different ways of serving them, and basically Air Nomad coffee became known as the best coffee everywhere.

And my family made it so that you could get that coffee all over instead of just wherever the Air Nomads happened to be.

My dad says that grandad Aang built the first Air Nomad Coffee store in Republic City when Republic City was practically Republic Village.

He chuckles when he says it, so I guess that's funny but I don't know why. But I do know that Aang was so successful that people from all over the world wanted to come to his store and drink his coffee. It became known as Aang's, but that wasn't the name of this place until much later.

An _actual_ Northern Water Tribe princess even came in one time and there's a picture someone drew of her and she's dressed _so_ pretty. When I was little, I saw that picture and I wanted to be a princess, but I can't be unless I marry a prince and I think that's a raw deal. My aunt (not really my aunt) Lin says that _life_ is a raw deal and I think she's got that _right_.

After a while, the store was so successful and so many people wanted grandad Aang's coffee, he opened another store in the Fire Nations. But that only made things _worse_ , and people really got on at him about how they wanted his coffee, and I guess that's why he had to open stores _everywhere_.

My grandad died before I was born. My dad likes to say that Aang lives on through his coffee, and for a while I thought it was gross that people were drinking it, but then I learned about metaphors so _that_ was okay.

But even before Aang died, lots of other people realised he was doing something that people really liked and I guess they wanted people to like them, too, so they opened up their own shops.

Do you know many coffee shops there are in Republic City? Almost an entire _million_ , which is a number that means _a lot_. Our biggest rivals are Unalaq's Unique Lattes, and Amon's Equalist Espresso, and Hou Ting's Hot Drinks, and Flat White Lotus', and Red Lotus Roasts (the Lotus brothers used to be close but they fell out over what they thought was best to do about coffee, and also apostrophes), and Varricoffee, and Kuvira's Colossal Cold Brews.

I think my dad thinks he isn't as good at making new blends of coffee as _his_ dad, and he gets sad sometimes. When Aang was in charge, Air Nomad Coffee was everyone's favourite. But now there are lots of other places, and the Air Nomad Coffee Company isn't what it was. But this store, Aang's, is the oldest Air Nomad Coffee shop, and my dad works really hard to try and make it the best in the city.

And this is where Korra comes in.

Korra's from the South Pole. She's _beautiful_. She's got brown skin, and brown hair that used to be long but is shorter and even cuter now. She's got really big blue eyes, and a kinda goofy smile, and she's not short, but she's not really tall or anything. And she's really fit, and really strong, and really easy to embarrass, especially when she likes someone enough to want to kiss them!

Korra grew up in a tiny little village, and she didn't have an Air Nomad Coffee store, but her village did have coffee beans, and Korra got real good at making coffee.

My dad's mom Katara lives in a town one village over from where Korra lived because she moved back home after Aang died. And she had a bag of Korra's special blend and when she tasted it, she says it reminded her of Aang.

And so when my dad visited one time, Katara told him he should find Korra. And when he tasted her coffee, after he was finished visiting, he went right away and found Korra and offered her a job! I guess Korra's parents were a bit sad, but Korra was so excited to come to Republic City. And although she works behind the counter a lot, my dad's been training her to be a coffee master, too.

My dad's so good at his job because he works really hard and he studies a lot and he experiments all the time.

Korra does that stuff too, but she's just amazing at matching flavours in her head and making all these great drinks.

One time, this man came into the store with a bag of fire oranges he was taking to market, and Korra bought them from him. She took the oranges, and a bunch of Iroh variety beans, and some Bumi variety beans (which were one of Aang's favourites), and strained them through some cloth over ice, and added chocolate shavings. In front of everybody in the store she made up this drink, just like that! And when people tried it, they thought it should go on the big menu on the wall.

My dad came in and he got mad about it, because she just did it without getting his approval, and she _did_ kinda make a mess, and she used up the last of his Iroh beans. But when he got done telling her off, he tasted it, and, yeah, it went on the big menu on the wall and we call it a Pabu Cold Brew, now, and that was _my_ idea, although it was Bolin who told it to my dad.

(Bolin made one for me once and I can tell you it is really yummy.)

Korra loves doing stuff like that, making new drinks and blends of different beans, so when she found out about the Pro-Blending Tournaments, _of course_ she wanted to compete.

But my dad had promised to put Mako, Bolin's brother, forward the year Korra came to Republic City and that might have been it, except Asami Sato rang our bell one day.

Oh! I should tell you about Asami real quick!

If there's one thing that Republic City got wrong, it was having a president instead of a king or queen.

Republic City has a lot of coffee shops, but _no princesses_. What's the point of a place with no princesses?

At least, that's what I thought before I learned about Asami Sato.

Asami's the daughter of one of the city's richest people, the inventor of the Satomobile. She's really tall, and has long black hair, and green eyes, and she's the prettiest person I've ever seen, and she's always well dressed, and her makeup? It's amazing! And she's so smart she can do _anything_ , and I'm not kidding about that.

One time she was sitting in the store drinking coffee and drawing designs for a new airship and there was a delivery van that broke down outside.

Well Asami went out and took a look at the engine and then she took some parts from a broken old coffee machine we had in back and she took a couple of screwdrivers and a wrench and she fixed that driver's engine in less than twenty minutes. And she just went back to her table and her drawing like it was nothing.

But one of our regulars came in a minute later. His name is Dorak, and he works for Cabbage Corp building engines for all kinds of things. I went over to welcome him to the store and he smiled, and he said to me, "Ikki, you want to know something?"

And I said I knew lots of things, but I always wanted to learn more.

And Dorak said, "Well, I took a look at that engine out there, and I told that driver he'd need to get towed to a garage. And then I watched that woman take a bunch of scrap and all the wrong kinds of tools and get him up and running in less time that it would've taken me to figure out how to start the job. I'll tell you this, Ikki, there's no one else in Republic City could have done that, not even Hiroshi Sato himself."

So I went up to Asami and I asked her if there was anything she couldn't fix, and she gave me this sort of sad smile and said, "People."

But I said I wasn't so sure about that, because look at her coffee.

And she did, and the cup was steaming. Someone had made her a fresh cup because her old one got cold while she was fixing the van, and they'd just put it there less than a minute before Asami got back. Asami looked over at the counter where, you guessed it, Korra was working, and pretending she wasn't watching Asami. Asami's smile got wide and happy when she looked at Korra and sipped her coffee. Then she saw how big _my_ smile was, and Asami said I was smart, but I shouldn't read too much into things.

I didn't say anything else about it, because I am smart, and I knew she didn't want me to. So instead, I asked her if she would teach me how to fix things and build things and she told me she would, if I really wanted. She's shown me a few things since then, and it's really interesting, but really hard. Asami is always patient and she never gets mad at me, though, even when I do something wrong. And when I get something wrong, she explains why and shows me how to get it _right_ , and I usually do when I do it again. She's a really good teacher.

And do you want to know what I think? I think the other nations can keep their princesses, because we've got Asami, and she's way better.

The funny thing is, everybody liked Asami straight away, and now everyone in my family loves Asami, except Meelo, who looooves her, and Korra who...well, you'll see! But you know who didn't like her even one bit at first?

Korra again, that's who!

It's not really Asami's fault, either. Some of it's Mako's fault, and some of it's Korra's, and a lot of it has to do with how that coffee-machine I was talking about got broken.

But that lady waving and yelling over there is my mom, and it's almost my bedtime, so I'll get into all of that another time.

It's where things start to get cute, though, so I'm excited!

I hope you enjoyed your time in Aang's, and that you'll come back soon!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm not really sure what this. If you have any ideas, let me know below!
> 
> (Also, apologies, but I probably won't be updating this frequently...)


End file.
